


The Inventor's Daughter

by aetataureate



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Growing Up, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 21:51:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18747799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aetataureate/pseuds/aetataureate
Summary: Here's what Morgan remembers of her father: a hand on the gearshift, a voice pitched loud over the radio, and a pair of familiar-looking eyes in the rearview mirror.





	The Inventor's Daughter

Morgan’s dad used to take her to the park when she was little. She remembers being strapped into the middle of the back of the car, kicking her sneakers against the seat to get them to light up. Her dad would turn up the music really loud, louder than Mom liked it to be, and they would sing along together. Her dad thought it was funny when she made up new words. It’s a golden-tinged memory, sunlight streaming sideways through the windows, and when she gets a bit older she’s not sure whether she actually remembers it, or she’s just been told about it too many times. Apparently he used to push her on the swings, but she doesn’t remember the swings at all.

She asks Happy about it, but even as she does so, she realizes it’s not a very good question. She can’t quite form the whole of it in her mind at once. Happy knows mostly everything, but he can’t know whether or not her dad would reach up and adjust the rearview so he could see her while she talked. But that’s what she remembers of her father: a hand on the gearshift, a voice pitched loud over the radio, and a pair of familiar-looking eyes in the mirror.

***

Morgan’s babysitter is named Peter, and he is the coolest person in the entire world. He comes during what her mother calls “a very specific size of emergency,” which rapidly becomes Morgan’s very favorite size of emergency. Peter always brings cool science stuff, sets that show her how electricity works or let her do chemistry experiments, and he explains things even better than the instruction books do. He also has the best Legos, and if she’s really good and eats all of her vegetables he’ll do a double backflip. Morgan is in love with him with her whole heart until the moment she realizes she is in love with him, and then she’s too embarrassed to look him in the eye for two and a half years.

Peter tells stories about her dad sometimes, because they did so much cool stuff together when Peter was still learning how to be a grown-up. Morgan thinks her dad must have been pretty good at teaching people how to be grown-ups, since Peter turned out so cool. Peter says there were mixed results sometimes, and that Peter was usually better off when he listened to his Aunt May, but he says it with a funny smile, and he keeps pictures of himself with Morgan’s dad on his phone. It’s around this time that Morgan decides she’s jealous of Peter, because her dad spent way more time being Peter’s dad than he spent being her dad.

Happy says it’s normal to be jealous, and she shouldn’t feel bad about having mean feelings as long as she thinks before she acts. He gets all choked up when she talks about her dad like he’s a stranger, though, so she tries not to bring it up too much.

***

Morgan’s mom is a normal mom most of the time. Her job is important, and people are calling her at all hours with questions about the Rebuilding, but she comes home every night and sits on the couch to read with Morgan or watch a movie. They paint their nails together, and cook dinner, and her mom tells funny stories about the people she meets down in the city. 

Once or twice a year—not always on the same day, just once or twice a year—she pulls out the video Morgan’s dad left them, and they watch it together. Her mom is always sad for the rest of the week. That’s only one or two weeks, though, out of the entire year—lots of Morgan’s friends’ moms are sad every day. Morgan just has to deal with her mom and Happy trying to feed her tons of cheeseburgers—Morgan stopped liking cheeseburgers a long time ago, but she never tells them that.

***

Uncle Rhodey teaches her how to drive. She always assumed that Happy would teach her, but when she mentions it to him, he laughs and tells her he’s not about to put himself out of a job. Morgan’s pretty sure driving hasn’t been his main job for, like, years, but whatever—she suspects the real reason is that Rhodey feels bad that he’s been too busy trying to pull the two halves of their world back together to come to family dinners. She’s never held that against him, though, especially since she knows how much of the world still needs fixing. 

The last class that was born entirely before the Vanishing just graduated, and the hallways feel strangely empty. She read an article once that called them the true Lost Generation, the meager product of five years of plummeting birth rates that left a hole even the Return couldn’t fill. Morgan never understands that loss as intimately as she does when sitting in the too-quiet classrooms. She likes to imagine them filling the empty seats sometimes, the quarter of her peers that simply never were. They learn about the projected demographic impacts in AP Gov.

Regardless, she’s never faulted Rhodey for any of the things missing in her life, no matter what he thinks. The only thing she blames him for is the way he keeps grabbing the oh-shit handle and yelling “Mailbox!” even though there are only, like, three mailboxes on her street, and she’s nowhere near any of them.

***

They’re standing in the middle of Killian Court, staring up at the Great Dome with the rest of the tour group, when one of the other prospective students recognizes her mom and guesses who she is. This happens sometimes—Morgan should have guessed it would happen more on the MIT campus. He starts talking—not _to_ her so much as _at_ her—about the research he wants to do. Apparently, it’s based on something her dad figured out about propulsion, which is very important and influential and widely studied among the people who study that sort of thing. He talks extremely loudly and for an extremely long time, his voice bouncing endlessly off the walls of the Infinite Corridor. He also assumes she knows a lot of stuff—stuff about her dad’s work, but also stories, apocrypha about his lab habits, his fights with the major journals, the pranks he pulled when _he_ was at MIT. (“Hacks,” he corrects her. “They’re called _hacks_.”)

Morgan doesn’t know any of these stories, and it makes her feel sick to her stomach. Her dad is alive in their home—she knows about the suit he ruined on his wedding day, and the weird way he did the dishes, and the time he broke his thumb trying to build her a treehouse. She doesn’t know the energy output of each successive generation of Arc Reactor, or the text of the landmark address he gave to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. She hates how upset it makes her, when other people know things about her dad.

“Everyone always assumes I’m going to go to MIT,” she tells Happy on their way home. He’s half-dozing in the passenger seat, the pretense that he’s still their driver finally abandoned.

Happy cracks an eye and looks at her. “Are you?”

Morgan flexes her fingers on the wheel. “I just sometimes feel like I’m fulfilling a prophecy, instead of making a decision.”

“Hm,” Happy says. They pass a billboard advertising new single-family homes from the low 300s. “Do you want to be an engineer?”

“Maybe?” Morgan says. Then, after a moment: “No?”

“You know who you should talk to about this.”

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

There’s a minor accident on the parkway ahead of them. The police are already there, and Morgan slows to go around it. “Do you think she’ll be disappointed?”

“Hm,” Happy says again. “I think you’ll be surprised at how disappointed she isn’t.”

***

Happy drops her off at college. Her mom was going to, but she got held up at work. They’re having coffee tomorrow instead, since they’re both in the city now. Morgan stands at the corner of 121st and Amsterdam holding a cardboard box, and thinks that this was always where she was supposed to be.

On the first night, Morgan opens her dorm window and leans out, looking over the lights of the city. There haven’t been rolling blackouts for years. She can just see the blue tinge emanating from the center of the city—her father’s heart, casting a faint glow on everything it touches.

“Thanks, Dad,” she murmurs, and shuts the window.

**Author's Note:**

> I think Tony Stark is one of if not _the_ most interesting and complex character in the MCU, but he’s not a personal favorite and I’ve never been motivated to write anything about him. After Endgame, though, and the associated whirlwind of emotions, this was what stuck in my mind as the story I wanted to tell. Shoutout to girlbookwrm for helping me make it happen, and cheers to Tony Stark, the godfather of the MCU.
> 
> Questions, comments, and kudos always appreciated—there is up-to-date contact info in my profile, come say hi!


End file.
